Today's Wall Street Journal Online's take on it:
[SPACE FOR RENT: Think spam is bad? Well, at least you can delete it. What if you had to look at it nightly, even without being near your computer?
The Associated Press quoted Alexander Lavrynov, a Russian spacecraft designer, as saying he's patented a device that would put ads into space for people on Earth to see. The idea is to arrange satellites employing reflectors to catch sunlight into patterns -- think of each satellite as a pixel like the ones on your PC screen. (Or like a peg in Lite Brite, if we may channel our childhoods for a moment.)
"People would be able to see writing in the skies from the Earth no worse than they see the stars," Mr. Lavrynov told the AP.
You can already imagine it, can't you? You take little Johnny out into the backyard to use the new binoculars he got for Christmas and the first thing he wants to look at is the "Drink Coke" message emblazoned across the heavens. Nighttime joggers draw inspiration from the graceful way "Just Do It" is rendered above them. Lost ships no longer have to use annoyingly faint Polaris, because the North Star is now the center of a far-brighter logo for Compass Bank. (As New Yorkers, the Real Timers' sky has only a handful of visible stars, but still.)
If that sounds bad, well, the reality would probably be worse. Most respectable businesses fear lethal PR, so we doubt Coke or Nike or Compass Bank would actually use space for advertising. But there are companies out there that don't care: Consider the case of the gambling Web site (we're not going to name it) that hires streakers to run around at sporting events with its Web address written or tattooed on themselves.
It's never safe to assume something is beyond the pale for sleazy marketers -- if you need proof, just look in your e-mail. But besides the price tag, we found reason to hope in a 1967 treaty on the uses of space signed by nearly 100 countries so far. It states that "parties to the Treaty shall bear international responsibility for national activities in outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, whether such activities are carried on by governmental agencies or by nongovernmental entities."
A good start, but not quite enough to persuade us the high frontier is safe from ads -- there's a reason shady organizations set up shop in the benighted regions of the globe. We could hope that the technology needed to put ads in space will always be too expensive, but as space-exploration geeks we find that upsetting, too.
Which forces us to fall back on hope that this particular threat will remain the goofy story it is today. But hope is the frailest of emotions: Back in 1995 we probably would have laughed off the idea that it would take less than a decade for newsgroup posts hawking immigration help to metastasize into a flood of e-mail spam for everything from **** to printer ink. So we'll laugh at Mr. Lavrynov's idea, but we'll do it with our fingers crossed.]
